I mention this only because it gives me a chance to tell you about one of the saddest features of my Twitter feed, which is that every couple of weeks, someone out there in the dunderweb @-mentions me with this super clever new variant they've just now thought up all by themselves on either "now you have two problems" or the Law of Software Envelopment (the latter usually sounds something like "Hurf durf cloud durf Facebook hurf durf expands hurf durf git".)

Stop.

Stop. Please stop.

Staaaaahhhhhhhhhppp.

You are making a "GOT MILK"* joke here, people. It's the Twenty First God Damned Century. It is no longer the Nineteen Hundred and Nineties. It's time for some new jokes!

Pff. Regexp is just the punchline, the structure of the joke is what's funny, a curatorial stroke of thoughtfulness and generosity. I really think Friedl's idea of a martial version: “Some people think `Let's ask the officers'....” is ultimately timeless.

and here I'm almost certainly abusing the term punchline, as the context is the flexible item being punched, but the humor requires the implicit 'now you have two problems'. I think there is must be somewhere a syntactic theory of jokes that would provide a more accurate terminology. Someday I expect it will be incorporated into gcc.